


Team Lorne

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Paint The Sky With Stars [30]
Category: Night World - Fandom, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Witches, Crossover, Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 15:12:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7273174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompt: "'Stargate Atlantis, Any Team, the different ways they become family to each other."</p><p>Lorne's team is its own family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Team Lorne

It was stupid, but Stevens kinda liked being on cleaning duty. Basically everyone who wasn’t a team leader had to do it at least once, Marines and Air Force alike, but even now that Stevens was leader of his own team, he still pitched in with Walker, Coughlin, and Reed when it was their turn to clean. Teldy had never gotten around to rearranging the cleaning schedules, so old teams fell back in together, some minus their leaders, some not. Stevens liked cleaning duty because it reminded him of family, of home. He and his sister had been bounced to lot of foster homes growing up, but their caseworker had been good enough to keep them together, and Stevens had always appreciated that. He knew his best chance of staying in one home for a long time was to be good at chores, so he and Lily would buckle down and clean together, singing as they went. Stevens had always linked music and physical activity. Made things like running or marching less mindless. Back at basic, he’d always had the best jody calls. Lily had called him a poet. It was the closest he’d ever had to having his own band.  
  
Walker didn’t like cleaning, didn’t like it one bit, but he’d grown up the youngest of a dozen sisters or something equally ridiculous, and he did like to sing. Thing was, his very conservative christian parents hadn’t let anyone in the house listen to the radio or watch television, so he’d grown up with a carefully curated (read: Rated G) collection of movies, most of which were musicals, and the majority of those were Disney cartoons at best. When he was feeling particularly peevish about cleaning duty, he’d sing Hard Knock Life from Annie or one of the prisoner songs from Les Miserables or something else mournful and sad. At least he had a good singing voice.  
  
Reed didn’t like cleaning, and he didn’t like singing, but he did like cooking, was happiest when they were on KP duty (he liked KP even more than he liked going offworld, which was just bizarre). So he put up with Stevens and his criticisms of other people’s scrubbing skills, and he hummed along tunelessly when Walker sang, and when they got into the kitchen, he took the lead. Chopping, stirring, mixing, directing. He couldn’t make fancy food like Major Lorne could, but everything he made tasted good, and there was always lots of it. Stevens never came away from a Reed-made meal unsatisfied, and he was never hungry twenty minutes later, not even when Reed made Chinese.  
  
Coughlin didn’t like cleaning, and he didn’t like cooking, but he liked people. He was incapable of being alone. When they were first shipping over on the Daedalus, he’d followed Major Lorne everywhere, asking him questions about the SGC and Atlantis and Pegasus and, when those questions finally ran out, about the major himself. As long as he got to be with his team, he didn’t care what they were doing, so long as they were nearby and he could do a quick headcount and reassure himself they were all there. At first Stevens had found it really irritating, that he never had a moment to himself, that the second he felt like he could relax, Coughlin would appear, begging for conversation the way a dog begged for a game of fetch. Eventually, Stevens learned that Coughlin didn’t need to be entertained for long, that as long as he was in the same room as someone else, he could sit quietly and entertain himself, read a book or something else.

Major Lorne, Stevens noted, was cool with just about anything. Cleaning - he pitched in where a lot of other team leads didn’t. Singing - he had a pretty voice. Cooking - he was a damn good cook. Usually after their KP nights, he’d make something special, just for them, for one of their Team Night dinners, and everything he made was delicious, even if he took a bit of a mothering tone in cajoling Coughlin, who was a picky eater, into trying something new. Major Lorne was really good at just hanging out and being, too. No talking, no noise, just the five of them in a room together, doing their own thing. Major Lorne usually drew or sketched or painted, and sometimes he read books. For the longest time he’d been the first to duck out (to see Colonel Sheppard, though no one dared say it aloud; and more recently to see Ronon), but he always made sure his team knew they came first for him.  
  
Because they weren’t just a team. They were family.  
  
And now that family was shattered, Major Lorne gone, the four of them scattered into different teams. Besides cleaning duty and kitchen duty (which happened less frequently for the off-world teams now that they were down a team), they rarely saw each other.  
  
By some unspoken agreement, the four of them began sitting together during Teyla’s group meditations. And somehow meditating together turned into training together. After a cleaning or a KP shift, they’d gather in someone’s quarters - usually Stevens’s, now that he was a team leader himself and had merited bigger digs - and practice lighting candles. Coughlin was the best at it, Stevens the worst, kept burning himself.  
  
But they kept working together, learning and trying and practicing, because they had to find Major Lorne before Teldy and Sheppard did, and they had to warn him. That’s what family did.


End file.
